SLI 1080 cards or one 1080TI for 3D and multimedia?

white_wildfire

Hi guys. My name is Kristoffer and Im on the verge of upgrading my GPU from rx480 to 1080. Im a concept art student so I do alot of modeling, sculpting, rendering, in 3D, and I need advice from people who know what they are talking about.. Im at a point where Im thinking if I should get 2 SLI connected 1080:s or one powerful 1080TI? For your knowledge Im using Maya with Arnold, might switch to Vray, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Octane, Keyshot, Modo, and Premiere. The double SLI is slightly more expensive, but if it really is a boost over TI Im willing to invest in it. Im running on a 6700 SKylake, 64 DD4 fast RAM and SSD. Im also looking into getting 4K monitors down the road. Im also thinking about switching to Linux and uusing Blender which I hear good things about, together with 3dCoat. Using Zbrush now. What shall I think about? I have been watching some YT videos, but I really need an experts opinion.

Axi5

You really don't need that much GPU power if you're going to be rendering with V-Ray or Arnold, though it's still a good to have.

Go with the single card, I hear too many compatibility issues with SLI happening.

PolyHertz

SLI is not recommended as few apps these days properly take advantage of it, and it may even introduce glitches that aren't there when using a single GPU. 1080Ti is by far the better option.

white_wildfire

Ok, thank you Axi5 and PolyHertz. My friend told me the same. It does tip towards 1080 TI. For sure. Its a powerful card indeed, perfectly suited for my needs as fast iterations, quick renders, and look development is high on the list. Also being able to flow freely with high count in viewport is a must. I´ve seen though rigs with up to 8 1080:s BTW. Pretty awesome technological solution. I´m very happy though, and I think I will go with it. 

Froyok

For your information, Substance Painter doesn't support SLI. It will most probably crash if the feature is enabled.

white_wildfire

hmm, ok. Thanks. I was also looking at 

AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. 

does anyone have experience of this card for 3D work? Ive seen a few tests but most of them are for games. This is AMD:s new architecture, and Im wondering if this could be a better choice than 1080Ti.

white_wildfire

Froyok said:

For your information, Substance Painter doesn't support SLI. It will most probably crash if the feature is enabled.

Ah, ok, so a single TI would work much better in that case? Does Iray render faster with CUDA? TI sounds like the best choice. I ordered it today.

white_wildfire

Oh these benchmarks. Drives me into a corner with all the numbers and bars. But dominating factor is that TI is best suited for me in this case, as I want a powerful card with CUDA. Something the Pro Duo with 32GB does not have. Its gonna be awesome. So I put in an order today. There were also alot of chatting about double precision float points or similiar. I guess I have to study more.

EarthQuake

This is a great site for comparing: https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

In most cases, you're paying a lot more over a regular 1080 for about 12% better performance. The price curve for super high end hardware is always out of whack. Hell, a 1080 Ti really isn't that much faster than a 1070.

The Vega looks to be a bit slower than a stock 1080 and even more absurdly priced. AMD driver support can be iffy as well.

The only situation where the Ti is going to be noticeably better is if you're doing a lot of rendering in Octane, which is a GPU renderer. The Ti has about 1/3rd more Cuda cores which will help there. If you're going with a CPU renderer like Vray or Arnold, the Ti will do absolutely nothing for you. The extra VRAM will probably help for VRAM heavy tasks like complex documents in Substance Painter, but I'm not sure how much real world difference that makes.

As others have mentioned, do not bother with SLI. There are limitations in how SLI works (you don't get more VRAM by stacking additional cards), and the general support for it is poor. Again, if you're doing lots of rendering in Octane, you can take advantage of SLI, and people build dedicated render rigs in these situations. But if you're just doing an occasional Octane render, it's not worth the hassle.

With this and your CPU thread it seems like you're trying to blow stupid amounts of money on whatever is "the best". If you make your money on quick render time turnaround, it generally makes sense to invest in super high end hardware (because it will pay for itself). If you're just like, doing normal 3D art stuff, working freelance, trying to get into the industry, doing personal art, etc, it makes no god damn sense whatsoever. Oh I just re-read your post and you're a student doing concept art? LOL man you don't need a 1080 Ti, that's insane.

Spec out a good $1500 workstation, replace it with another $1500 workstation in 4 years, the next $1500 box will be faster than a $4000 box you can build today, and you've spent less money overall. Plus a $1500 workstation today is going to be extremely capable.

EarthQuake

One last thing: that 480 is like ~1 year old and cost what, $400? That's still a very good card. You don't have to spend $500 every year on a new GPU to work in game dev. 

white_wildfire

Thanks alot for this comments EarthQuake. Really good and smart and thought provoking.  I just got the card so I have some work to do, but I want to take time and think it through before I reply to your words. So dont think Im ditching anything, just want to write good causes for my purchase and why I got it in the first place. 

white_wildfire

I really have to think about this, buut probably I will invest in it. Thanks so much for your comments. They help.-

white_wildfire

I installed the card. Obviously there are alot of critical advantages with it except that it looks awesome in my machine. The first thing I noticed was the iteration speed in Iray in Substance Painter. As a concept artist stuudent, I try to find new ways of making quick look development shots, which will guide me in choices I make.  The TI is so fast, and to be precise, I got 1000 iterations around one minute, where rx 480 kicks off perhaps 100 at the most. Also, I can now work with much bigger maps, for alot of detail with the new card. It makes a huge difference.  Also, I use Modo which I will arm with Vray and that is also GPU based (partly, it also uuses multicore capability.) So I´m really happy with my purchase. It really brings a whole new perspective to my work.